In 1892, the year after Melville’s death, Arthur Stedman wrote a “Biographical and Critical Introduction” to Typee. During the final years of Melville’s sedulous isolation, Arthur Stedman was—with the minor exception of the late Dr. Titus Munson Coan, whose Missionary parentage Melville seems never to have quite forgiven him—the single man who clung to Melville with any semblance of personal loyalty. Stedman was unwavering in his belief that in his earlier South Sea novels, Melville had attained to his highest achievement: an achievement that entitled Melville to more golden opinions, Stedman believed, than Melville ever reaped from a graceless generation. To Stedman—as to Dr. Coan—Melville’s later development into mysticism and metaphysics was a melancholy perversity to be viewed with a charitable forbearance, and forgiven in the fair name of Fayaway. Dr. Coan repeatedly used to recount, with a sigh at his frustration, how he made persistent attempts to inveigle Melville into Polynesian reminiscences, always to be rebuffed by Melville’s invariable rejoinder: “That reminds me of the eighth book of Plato’s Republic.” This was a signal for silence and leave-taking. What was the staple of Stedman’s conversation is not known. But despite the fact that Melville was to him a crabbed and darkly shadowed hieroglyph, he clung to Melville with a personal loyalty at once humorous and pathetic. Melville to him was the “man who lived with the cannibals,” and merited canonisation because of this intimacy with unholy flesh. Stedman published in the New York World for October 11, 1891, a tribute to his dead friend, significantly headed: “Marquesan” Melville. A South Sea Prospero who Lived and Died in New York. The Island Nymphs of Nukuheva’s Happy Valley. While Stedman was not necessarily responsible for this caption, it is, nevertheless, a just summary of the fullest insight he ever got into Melville’s life and works. The friendship between Petrarch and Boccaccio is hardly less humorous than the relationship between Melville and Stedman; and surely Melville has suffered more, in death, if not in life, from the perils of friendship than did Petrarch: more even than did Baudelaire from the damaging admiration of Gautier. When one’s enemy writes a book, one’s reputation is less likely to be jeopardised by literary animosity than it is by the best superlatives of self-appointed custodians of one’s good name. But as Francis Thompson has observed, it is a principle universally conceded that, since the work of a great author is said to be a monument, the true critic does best evince his taste and sense by cutting his own name on it. Critical biographers have contrived a method to hand themselves down to posterity through the gods of literature, as did the Roman emperors through the gods of Olympus—by taking the heads off their statues, and clapping on their own instead. Criticism is a perennial decapitation.
“I have a fancy,” says Stedman, in his Biographical and Critical Introduction, “that it was the reading of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast which revived the spirit of adventure in Melville’s breast. That book was published in 1840, and was at once talked of everywhere. Melville must have read it at the time, mindful of his own experience as a sailor. At any rate, he once more signed a ship’s articles, and on January 1, 1841, sailed from New Bedford harbour in the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific Ocean and the sperm fishery.”
In the second part of this statement, Stedman attempts to stick to the letter: but there is a flaw in his text. That Melville sailed in the Acushnet is corroborated by a statement in the journal of Melville’s wife; in the record surviving in Melville’s handwriting, headed “what became of the ship’s company on the whaleship Acushnet, according to Hubbard, who came back in her (more than a four years’ voyage) and visited me in Pittsfield in 1850;” as well as by surviving letters written by Richard Tobias Greene, the Toby of Typee.
The roster of Melville’s ship is preserved in Alexander Starbuck’s bulky History of the American Whale Fishery from its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (published by the author, Waltham, Mass., 1878). Starbuck rates the Acushnet as a ship of 359 tons, built in 1840. Her managing owners are reported as having been Bradford Fuller & Co. Under command of Captain Pease she sailed from Fairhaven, bound for the whaling grounds of the Pacific, on January 3, 1841, and returned to Fairhaven on May 13, 1845, laden with 850 barrels of sperm oil, 1350 barrels of whale oil, and 13500 pounds of whale-bone. On July 18, 1845, she started upon her second voyage, under command of Captain Rogers, to return June 7, 1848, stocked with 500 barrels of sperm oil, 800 barrels of whale oil, and 6000 pounds of whale-bone. On December 4, 1847, she had a boat stove by a whale, with the loss of the third mate and four of the crew. Her third voyage, begun August 31, 1848, under command of Captain Bradley, was her last. As by some malicious fatality, the Acushnet was lost on St. Lawrence Island on August 31, 1851, within a month of the time when Melville brought Moby-Dick to its tragic close.
Between Stedman’s and Starbuck’s accounts of the time and place of Melville’s sailing there is a discrepancy of half a mile and two days. This discrepancy, however, does not necessarily impugn Stedman’s accuracy. Fairhaven is just across the Acushnet river from New Bedford, and “sailing from New Bedford” may be like “sailing from New York”—which is often in reality “sailing from Hoboken.”
Stedman dates Melville’s sailing January 1; Starbuck, January 3. Melville launches the hero of Moby-Dick neither from New Bedford nor from Fairhaven, but from Nantucket. Ishmael begins his fatal voyage aboard the Pequod on December 25; and there is a fitting irony in the fact that on the day that celebrates the birth of the Saviour of mankind, the Pequod should sail forth to slay Moby-Dick, the monstrous symbol and embodiment of unconquerable evil.
That Dana’s book should have fired Melville to an impetuous and romantic jaunt to the South Seas, though an ill-favoured statement, is Stedman’s very own. When a boy concludes the Christmas holidays by a mid-winter plunge into the filthy and shabby business of whaling; when a young man inaugurates the year not among the familiar associations of the gods of his hearth, but among semi-barbarous strangers of the forecastle of a whaler: to make such a shifting of whereabouts a sign of jolly romantic exuberance, is engagingly naïve in its perversity.
Just what specific circumstances were the occasion of Melville’s escape into whaling will probably never be known: what burst of demoniac impulse, either of anger, or envy, or spite; what gnawing discontent; what passionate disappointment; what crucifixion of affection; what blind impetuosity; what sinister design. But in the light of his writings and the known facts of his life it seems likely that his desperate transit was made in the mid-winter of his discontent. That the reading of Dana’s book should have filled his head with a mere adolescent longing for brine-drenched locomotion and sent him gallantly off to sea is a surmise more remarkable for simplicity than insight.
Melville never wearies of iterating his “itch for things remote.” Like Thoreau, he had a “naturally roving disposition,” and of the two men it is difficult to determine which achieved a wider peregrination. It was Thoreau’s proud boast: “I have travelled extensively in Concord.” He believed that Concord, with its sylvan environment, was a microcosm “by the study of which the whole world could be comprehended,” and so, this wildest of civilised men seldom strayed beyond its familiar precincts. His was a heroic provincialism, that cost him little loss either in worldliness or in wisdom. Though his head went swimming in the Milky Way, his feet were well-rooted in New England sod. “One world at a time” was the programme he set himself for digesting the universe: and he looked into the eyes of this world with cold stoical serenity.
Melville made no such capitulation with reality. Between the obdurate world of facts and his ardent and unclarified desires there was always, to the end of his life, a blatant incompatibility. Alongside the hard and cramping world of reality, and in more or less sharp opposition to it, he set up a fictitious world, a world of heart’s desire; and unlike Thoreau, he hugged his dream in jealous defiance of reality. It is, of course, an ineradicable longing of man to repudiate the inexorable restrictions of reality, and return to the happy delusion of omnipotence of early childhood, an escape into some land of heart’s desire. Goethe compared the illusions that man nourishes in his breast to the population of statues in ancient Rome which were almost as numerous as the population of living men. Most men keep the boundaries between these two populations distinct: a separation facilitated by the usual dwindling of the ghostly population. Flaubert once observed that every tenth-rate provincial notary had in him the debris of a poet. As Wordsworth complains, as we grow away from childhood, the vision fades into the light of common day. Thoreau clung to his visions; but they were, after all, cold-blooded and well-behaved visions. And by restricting himself to “one world at a time,” by mastering his dream, he mastered reality. Alcott declared that Thoreau thought he dwelt in the centre of the universe, and seriously contemplated annexing the rest of the planet to Concord. The delicacy of the compliment to the rest of the planet has never been adequately appreciated. Melville’s more violent and restive impulses never permitted him to feel any such flattering attachment to his whereabouts, whether it was Albany, Liverpool, Lima, Tahiti or Constantinople. Like Rousseau, who confessed himself “burning with desire without any definite object,” Melville always felt himself an exile from the seacoast of Bohemia. But his nostalgia, his indefinite longing for the unknown, was not, in any literal sense, “homesickness” at all. As Aldous Huxley has observed: